Archive for January, 2010

Not that this will surprise anyone, considering the retraction the Lancet made in 2002. This BBC report of the ruling of the General Medical Council also includes a nice graph showing the enormous impact on measles infection rates that the doctors who conducted the shoddy research had. Most of them have issued their own 2004 retraction, though not Wakefield, the lead author. I wonder if they are now vulnerable to a malpractice action of some description, as lawyers are for inadequate research. I don’t know if any deaths have occurred, but this account by Roald Dahl is not fun . . . [more]

The Real-time web has been a popular topic in recent times as we all try to figure out how it is changing, and will continue to change our work lives. I’ve recently started Yammering here at Dalhousie; no not prattling on endlessly, but using the service Yammer or enterprise microblogging. In simple terms think Twitter, without the 140 character limit and limited to your workplace or business email domain. The product has been around for a couple of years and has been referred to in passing here at Slaw previously. In the short time that I’ve used Yammer at . . . [more]

This fillip revisits something I blogged about two years ago (Flogging). Microsoft researchers are working with computer scientist Gordon Bell to develop a system that will record, annotate, and make available to recall, nearly every aspect of his daily life. A number of videos describing the project and showing aspects of it have emerged since I first blogged about it. And Bell and co-author Jim Gemmell published a book last year about this long-term experiment, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (Roughcut). (Amazon lets you peek inside the book at a few of the . . . [more]

I hope that this is not a new theme emerging: privacy proceedings in limbo.

Last week I wrote about how the recent vacancy of the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office in BC could have placed all pending files on hold. Now, this week, we have a decision [PDF] from the Alberta Court of Appeal that suggests the Commissioner there, Frank Work, may have lost jurisdiction over at least 180 pending cases.

The legislation in issue requires the Commissioner to follow certaint timelines, which can be extended by the Commissioner. From the Personal Information Protection Act:

On May 1, 2009, 23 library partners, including the Paul Martin Law Library at the University of Windsor went live with Evergreen – an Open Source integrated library system. With only 2 – 3 developers to take it out of the box (originally packaged for the public library world), development has literally happened on the fly for the past 10 months.

It has been hectic, but we have a project we can all be proud of. To top it off, yesterday we heard that OLA has awarded the Project Conifer partners with two Divisional Awards. All awards will be presented . . . [more]

Yesterday, two members of Slaw were given an in-depth look at the most profound re-engineering of a legal research system since the migration to the Web. In Thomson Reuters’ impressive Eagan facility we had a briefing on the new Westlaw – to be launched at New York LegalTech next Monday under the name WestlawNext.

WestlawNext is the culmination of five years of research and development and a massive amount of customer research into how legal research is actually carried out. . . . [more]

Are there any concerns from a risk management / liability perspective over the following warning/error message on the e-Laws website I noticed just now:

NOTICE OF ERROR
From December 18, 2009 to December 29, 2009, the e-Laws currency date should have been December 14, 2009.

See the screenshot here:

Do you review all of your legislative research from December 2009 within this time period?

Part of me says “no” since the Legislative Assembly adjourned on December 10, 2009, (to resume on February 16, 2010) and there appears to have been only 2 proclamations gazetted during the time period in question. . . . [more]

My column this month is dedicated to personal finances. I greeted the New Year like so many other people I know – with a financial hangover that no aspirin was going to cure. Instead of the doctor I called my new neighbor on Salt Spring Island, financial planning guru Karin Mizgala, MBA, CFP, to share her best tips on how to put money woes to rest for good. Karin co-founded the Women’s Financial Learning Centre and has a financial planning column with the Financial Post.